ISSA / UCD Irish Cybercrime survey

The ISSA / UCD Irish Cybercrime survey for 2006 was released recently.

As someone with an interest in the value and cost of IT for businesses, the cost per incident was very interesting. 75% of correspondents in the survey incurred a cost of over €5,000 to correct security incidents, and 22% of correspondents reported costs of over €100,000.

For anyone inside a company considering the cost of IT security solutions, it's important to consider the cost to the business of downtime (i.e. productivity loss, loss of revenue, etc), the cost of recovering service, as well as the cost of personnel issues resulting from security/legal breaches by employees. Any decent IT security solution can, with the right policies and procedures in place, be worth its weight in gold when compared against the cost incurred from security incidents.

An invitation to participate in the 2007 survey is at the end of the report.